A Superior Sort of Liar

THE GREAT IMPOSTOR (218 pp.)--Robert Crichton--Random House ($3.95).

GENIUS WITHOUT PORTFOLIO UNMASKED

AGAIN ! the headlines shouted one day last January, and millions of readers pounced on the latest chapter in the amazing adventures of Ferdinand Waldo ("Fred") Demara Jr., the most spectacular impostor of modern times. A sick, brilliant, 37-year-old alter-egotist who never finished high school, Demara by main nerve and native intelligence has carried off careers as military surgeon, psychology professor, cancer researcher, dean of a school of philosophy, language teacher, law student, assistant prison warden, Trappist monk and the devil knows what else (TIME, Dec. 3, 1951; Feb. 25, 1957). Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this Cagliostro is his conscience; more often than not, he commits crimes of kindness and sins of social betterment.

Having long behaved like 36 characters in search of an author, Demara finally found the author in the person of Robert Crichton, 34-year-old son of Author-Editor Kyle (The Proud People) Crichton. The result is this slight, bright, abrasively readable biography of a bounder.

Sacred Mission. The central fact of Demara's life, according to Biographer Crichton, may be that he is a status sucker. He was eleven years old when his father, who owned movie houses in Lawrence, Mass., abruptly went broke. Kicked out of their mansion on Jackson Street, the Demaras landed in a shabby old carriage house on the wrong side of the gloomy old mill town. Fred hated poverty, with its stiff work boots and corduroy knickers, and he refused to face it. Every chance he got he sneaked back to the old house, sat in the attic and "dreamed about things I hoped would come true."

At 16, lulled by a dream about a "sacred mission," Fred ran away and joined the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists) at Valley Falls, R.I. The good fathers viewed the novice with some alarm. The boy already stood 6 ft. tall, weighed close to 200 Ibs., and the way he piled through a plate of turnips suggested strongly that he was riot meant to mortify the flesh. After two years the abbot gently told him so.

Soon afterward, Fred became a teacher at a Catholic school for boys. After a quarrel with the brother superior, he stole the school's station wagon, learned to drive as he went skidding down to Boston, got drunk and woke up the next morning as a buck private in the U.S. Army.

That's Freedom. From the moment Fred realized he was in, he had only one thought: how to get out. One day he stole credentials belonging to a bunkroom buddy, went quietly over the hill and presented himself at a Trappist cloister under the first of his false identities: Anthony Ingolia. Demara was well aware that he had committed a crime, but at first he felt no guilt. Later, he was deeply disturbed by the Pearl Harbor attack. "I wanted to do my part," he has explained. "I like this country, you know. Where else but in America could a man do all I've done? That's what I call freedom!" He left the monastery, joined the U.S. Navy, faked some college credentials and presented himself as a candidate for commission. When the security section started to investigate, Fred started to pack. He rejoined the Trappists, this time under the alias of Dr. Robert Linton French, a doctor of psychology whose search for truth had led him to abandon the world. But, as the brothers soon discovered, big, beefy Dr. French was not ready to abandon all of the world. He was caught "talking constantly," revealed gobbling grapes from the monastery's vines in defiance of the dietary regulations, and was advised to try another order.

And so Demara went--on and on around the monastery circuit. In his 205, he was caught by the FBI and tried by the Navy for desertion in wartime. Demara conducted his own defense, drew a six-year sentence, and with time off for good behavior, he went free in 18 months.

Even after that, the military life held a fascination for Fred, and in 1951 it offered him his most memorable role: Surgeon Lieut. Joseph Cyr of the Royal Canadian Navy. Demara's medical training consisted of a basic course in the U.S. Navy's hospital school, ten months as a hospital orderly in Boston, amplified by voracious reading of medical texts. Nevertheless, when assigned to Korean waters aboard the destroyer Cayuga, he performed such prodigies of battle surgery --an emergency amputation, the extraction of a bullet from the heart sac itself --that Cyr's story was published in Canadian newspapers. The real Dr. Cyr heard about it, and the jig was up.

Pure Rascality. After that, Demara promised himself to straighten out and make a new man of himself: Demara. But somehow it seemed terribly dull to be only one person at a time, and before long the unemployed impostor had another job. In the last two years he has had at least five of them: he served as a lieutenant warden in a Texas prison, a teacher among the Eskimos, a civil engineer in Yucatan, a couple of high school teachers. And in recent months, says Crichton, Demara has been working on what he gleefully calls "the biggest caper of them all"--for details, watch your local newspaper.

Why does he go on? The psychiatrists have grandly labeled the lovable fraud a borderline schizophrenic with a document syndrome and something like histrionic genius. But Biographer Crichton is content to quote Demara without comment. On the psychology of imposture: "Every time I take a new identity, some part of the real me dies." On the nature of his gifts: "I am a superior sort of liar. I don't tell any truth at all, so then my story has a unity of parts, a structural integrity. [It] sounds more like the truth than truth itself." On the leading passion of his life: "It's rascality! Pure rascality!"

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